With the rapidly growing need for high-speed data connections to businesses and residences (driven mainly by the need to access the Internet) a faster and more economical method is needed in order to deliver these connections. Optical fibre offers the greatest potential to deliver high-speed services due to its ability to carry high bandwidth over long distances. One problem that the telecommunications industry has been faced with is the high cost of installing optical fibre between the provider and the end customer. This issue has restricted the expansion of optical networks to very densely populated regions where the economics can justify the expensive conventional construction process of burying cable within a relatively large trench.
It has been suggested that an inexpensive and simple means to lay cable is within a shallow slit-like trench cut into an upper layer of pavement or the like, for the laying of a cable within or immediately under a street or other surface. Such a system requires a convenient means to form junctions or branches within the cable system. In conventional cable-laying systems or methods, the forming of a branching network requires considerable additional excavation in order to install conventional junction boxes or the like.
It is desirable to provide a simple and inexpensive system for installing a branching-type network of fibre optic cables within a variety of surfaces. One approach that is known is to install cable within narrow slit-like trenches or recesses that are cut, for example, into street surfaces. Such an arrangement should also provide a convenient means for subsequent location of intersection points, as well as providing for future expansion of the cable network. For the latter, it is important that this system provide an easy means to provide cable slack without requiring the labour-intensive job of splicing of cables to meet future system needs.
Further, it is desirable to provide a junction box or branching node that readily fits within a narrow slit like trench or groove without requiring substantial additional excavation, and which further is easy to install and subsequently locate.